I am not religious about any of the formats. A lossless archive is a must because I never ever want to rip again. After some diversion to WMA and ALAC I have chosen FLAC because its native playback on the Squeezebox and flexible tagging. AAC/Nero was chosen because some cursory testing suggested smaller file sizes for the same quality when compared to MP3/LAME.

I'm no audiophile so MP3 suits me fine and I don't use lossless at all.

The way I rip my classical music CDs isn't shown as a poll option though! Here I combine all the movements for the same work into a single file to prevent my MP3 player fragmenting them on random play. Most CDs produce between two and four MP3 files.

Not being adept at scripting I need to use three programs:BonkEnc to rip and merge selected tracks - it was the first one I found that does a half decent job and reports the correct combined duration.Media Monkey to tag and catalogue the ripped files - I like its cataloguing and mass tagging featuresFoobar to produce second versions of the tracks using the VLevel DSP to compress the dynamic ranges for in-car replay - the only way I know of for doing this.

I store the two file versions on an external hard drive for portability.

This route is quite a lot of work, and most of the ID3V2 tags have to be edited to show the composer as the artist etc. I wonder if I it would be worth my while to learn how to write scripts to streamline it? I suspect not.

I finished my epic 1,700 CD ripping project last week and used ALAC for my lossless files. I mainly chose ALAC because I wanted to use iTunes to clean up my tags and artwork before backing them up and transcoding to lossy. For my lossy files I used Nero AAC at quality setting of .45. I have the lossless files if I ever want to try something else and I'm just going to use them on the iPod anyway. Prior to that all I had were 128kbps mp3 files that I mostly ripped five years ago. Going from those files to the new AAC files is like someone removed a towel from my speakers. I'm very happy with my results so far.

I actually do want to say I'm heavily impressed with how far LAME has come and it was a tough choice between AAC and MP3 for me. I've really wanted to be able to send a random track to a friend without worries or have to deal with 'support' for a format being buggy or otherwise sparse. While MP3 easily wins that, I rather like the results I get with regards to file sizes when using AAC which is great for my portables. Support is just prolific enough that I'll take the tradeoff. If I wind up regretting this choice, next year I'll be voting LAME.

So far as cuesheet/single file rips for lossless -- it really appeals to me from an organizational standpoint and more resembles an ISO backup with compression benefits, which might mean nothing to the next person. However, support for FLAC in this flavor has been spotty at best -- and WavPack's audience fell off a cliff. For the sake of no headaches, I'll take the compression hit.

It is. I ripped most of my music a while back using Vorbis, but have recently been re-ripping everything to VBR MP3. The main reason simply being that too few MP3 players etc. support Vorbis unfortunately, plus with MP3 I can use MP3Gain to apply ReplayGain to all my music in a manner that even my iPhone will cope with (along with all other MP3 players obviously).

That's always Vorbis's problem. No matter how good or free it is, the likes of Apple, Microsoft etc. will continue to support the bare minimum of formats for their software and hardware players and this leaves Vorbis out in the cold somewhat.

It would be slightly better if we could have at least two selections per choice, not just one: - for lossy I choose MP3, although I use regulary also Vorbis aoTuV - for lossless I choose FLAC, although I use TAK also

It would be slightly better if we could have at least two selections per choice, not just one: - for lossy I choose MP3, although I use regulary also Vorbis aoTuV - for lossless I choose FLAC, although I use TAK also

I second that.For lossy I use mp3 and lossyWAV + FLAC. lossyWAV is my preferred choice, but I had to vote for mp3 as currently I use it more often (due to DAP limitations).For real lossless purposes I use TAK, but I also use FLAC together with lossyWAV.

For losless I use Flac 8. As Flac is the most widely supported losless format, to me there is no better choice. My players (foobar, MPC, VLC) support Flac, and even my DAW (Samplitude) does since v10.2, which I highly appreciate . Moreover, coding is fast and decoding even faster.

For lossy I use mp3, encoded with lame (3.98.2) --abr 192 -q 0 --lowpass 20. (Why ABR and not VBR, see here). The only reason I use losssy at all, is getting small files for my portable players. And any player supports mp3. I'd much rather use OGG, but unfortunately my portable players do not support it. A much too little number of players actually do . It's the same old story that manufacturers are too reluctant to implement free standards.

I don't archive my cd's... if a cd breaks, i'll buy a new one. Simple as that. For the rest LAME -V0. In the past I've bought some AAC songs from the iTunes Store, but I prefer to buy cd's and vinyl and rip / download the mp3-versions. AAC sounds promising, but I found LAME MP3 overall better.